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OBE's and NDE's

  • Auteur de la discussion Auteur de la discussion gammagoblin
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gammagoblin

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What is your take on Out-of-Body-Experiences and Near-Death-Experiences?

I don't really know what to make of them. On one hand I find it logical that your brain can do crazy things when there is no more blood/oxygen coming. But on the other hand I have read accounts of people describing till detail what happened in the room while they were being reanimated.

On the point of OBE's... I find it strange that there isn't any validation as to whether or not it's real. A simple experiment could prove or disprove it. There are people that claim to be able to leave their body at will. Why not let them describe what happens in another room for example?

Also, drugs seem to be able to trigger them, so I am curious if some of you here have had one or more?

I myself had one, while on acid and XTC. I closed my eyes for a sec and suddenly I was floating near the ceiling, looking down at myself and my friends. Then a thought occured "it's not fun to be outside my body while being here with my friends" then I slipped back to my body again. Then came the cool thing. My body opened it's eyes while my spirit (or whatever) wasn't in my body yet and for a moment I could see 2 different angles. Then they slowly overlapped again when my spirit entered my body. Don't know if it was real or a hallucination from the acid though.
 
i never had one but i think it has to do with the dmt released in the brain's pineal gland when someone dies or somehow stimulates it by patterned breathing or meditiation. it hasn't been proven, but some think we make dmt when we dream as well

edit: also researchers have experimented with what u said, people seeing things in other rooms. they actually put signs or objects on shelves above the people where they couldn't see and asked them when they left their body if they saw anything, so far no one sees them. so i think they are intense and lifelike trips
 
Illegalsmile a dit:
i never had one but i think it has to do with the dmt released in the brain's pineal gland when someone dies or somehow stimulates it by patterned breathing or meditiation. it hasn't been proven, but some think we make dmt when we dream as well
Yes I have heard this theory more. But would it be real what you experience or would it be a hallucination?
 
have u ever seen the movie awake? a guy has a obe in a hospital, then walks around the hospital to discover things about his life and personal problems in his psyche its a very good and scary movie
 
"real or a hallucination"

what is real? is the question. or rather how does (any)one define it? that's what you have to look at

i'd say that it is real, in that, you really experienced it. ie: you aren't lying. however, it can also be considered not real, because it is not happening on the physical plane. your body navigates the physical plane, and you were'nt in your body. this simply means that your exploration was real aka you explored something, but not taking place in a "real" aka physical place

the problem is that words have more than one meaning, even if the meanings are along the same lines. whther it was real or not depends on your personal subjective definition of it, compared to your personal subjective experience of it.
 
The question "what is real?" is an interesting one indeed. I figured the only thing you can say for sure what is real is that "I am" or "I exist", everything else could be a hallucination. Can't know for sure.

However, I do not see this entirely relevant to the question of wheter or not OBE's are real. What I meant with real was, is it a sign of the afterlife? That it is true that you leave your body? Or is it your brain going haywire because of the lack of bloodsupply (in the case of an NDE)? This is a tricky answer I realize, because you can't say anything for certain about the afterlife until you're there.

However, with OBE's can be experimented. Like the experiment I posted in my openingspost. This would be a very interesting one and I hope people will do that sooner or later (or have it done already? don't know, couldn't find anything on the internet).
 
I think there have been some experiments done in regard to OBE's. I *think* they were briefly mentioned in one of my text books from a couple of years back. Don't know by heart what exactly they tested and what they concluded, but I'll see if I can find them again. Don't have much time now so I'll post about it later.
 
my crazy hypothesis is it is a trip and its real. When the human dies, their physical soul actually leaves the body and becomes intagled in the universe, like the whole universe. not like a ghost in the shape of a human like we see in movies, but like something we cant understand yet, omnipresent, everywhere at once.

so imagine how that would feel to you, being switched from one way of existing to another that fast.my first guess was our brain probably protects us by using dmt (the chemical in nde's) to soften the blow you know and let us put some kind of spiritual meaning to it. but my second guess is that dmt is a tool to help us reach that astral plane or whatever they call it and we actually need it to pass on

thats also how people feel when on psychedelics,especially hard trips where people see the galaxies and see god.i also think thats why shamans and priests around the world practice psychoactive rituals.
 
So, I found the book again.. and more :D I've added a link to rapidshare where I uploaded a ZIP-file with loads of articles on the subject of NDEs and OBEs at the end of this post (including articles of studies similar to those mentioned before). A lot of the NDE articles also cover OBEs as it is a common aspect of NDEs. Besides that you can go to http://www.springerlink.com/content/0891-4494/ and look at all the articles published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. A lot of the articles I added to the ZIP-file on rapidshare are from this journal, but there are still plenty that I didn't add. If you want a specific one you can PM me or post in this thread and I'll send it to you.

Personally I think OBEs provide some support for the possibility of perception without the need of a body. I say "some support" because even though there have been studies reporting the occurence of Extra-Sensorial Perception (ESP) during OBEs, these reports are not straighforward evidence of such ESP. Many 'successful' studies report numbers of say 60-80% of subjects reporting ESP (not necessarily of their physical surrounding, but also visual experiences similar to psychedelic experiences of visions, or the feeling of being somewhere completely different with strange "other-worldy" elemtens to it), and this is scientifically speaking not very convincing. It could just be attributable to chance (although it is hard to believe in cases of 80%). Additionally there have been experiments reporting (nearly) no ESP during OBEs.
Anyway, assuming that ESP is possible and does occur during OBEs/NDEs, does this automatically mean that there is life after death? Is the state of death the same as the state that NDE-/OBEers experience? Believing that death is the leaving behind of the body, with a remaining and 'surviving' soul, akin to what is experienced during an OBE or NDE, this would suggest NDEs and OBEs provide some evidence for life after death. But believing death is something else or something more, would make NDEs and OBEs a lot more irrelevant to that particular question. I do not and cannot know what death really is, so I find it very hard, near to impossible, to give an opinion on the matter, as you said yourself gammagoblin. EDIT: However two or three of the articles in the ZIP-file cover the implications of NDEs for life after death. I haven't read them yet myself, but I'm assuming they are just what you are looking for.

Illegalsmile a dit:
so imagine how that would feel to you, being switched from one way of existing to another that fast.my first guess was our brain probably protects us by using dmt (the chemical in nde's) to soften the blow you know and let us put some kind of spiritual meaning to it. but my second guess is that dmt is a tool to help us reach that astral plane or whatever they call it and we actually need it to pass on

DMT is a very interesting compund in my opinion, but I suggest to be very careful in using it to explain any of these kind of expriences. The evidence for DMT being produced in the brain is pretty much non-existant as far as I know. Rick Strassman proposed it is produced in the pineal glad because the right 'ingredients' for creating DMT in the brain could be found in the pineal gland. He did never find DMT in the brain. I read here and there that trace-amounts could be indentified in human urine, but I never read any scientific report on this (neither have I tried to find one though). Assuming that it is produced in the human brain, what you say could very well be true, but I can't really say anything in favour or against it. I myself have never used DMT before so I don't think I can accurately judge about its role in all of this.
EDIT: Something I forgot to mention yesterday (probably because it was between 3 and 4 AM :P): As a chemical alternative to DMT, while skimming through the articles, two or three of them postulated the so-called "Ketamine model" of NDEs (one of them is included in the ZIP-file). As ketamine is thought to be fairly reliable in inducing (something very similar to) NDEs it is suggested that through the blockade of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, the receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate, these experiences are induced. This is backed up by the observartion that conditions that commonly induce NDEs release a flood of glutamate in the brain, thus flooding the receptors. In turn it is suggested that other agents in the human brain, which are similar to ketamines action of blocking the NMDA-receptors would be released, blocking the receptors in order to protect the brain and consequently inducing a Near-Death experience.


Lastly, here is the link to the ZIP-file (it contains 12 articles on the subject, and, as I mentioned before, more can be found by following the link to SpringerLink): https://rapidshare.com/files/384400998/Articles_on_NDE___OBE.zip
 
good stuff mescaline, yea i realize there is not much proven about dmt and i have never personally used it but just from all the reading of dmt trips and nde's, the experiences are so similar i just keep coming to this conclusion.

i also heard of k- holes when using ketamine where some people feel as if they left their body, but i dont know enough about this kind of drug to guess anything. i think the dmt trips differ from ketamine because dmt, a psychedelic, is usually vivid and sometimes fast while ketamine, a tranquilizer, is normally hazy and slow.

as for proof of dmt in the brain, i have always heard rumors like in the book "fear and loathing in las vegas" where the lawyer talks about this fictional drug that is only obtainable from the pineal gland in a human, or sheep brain. pretty dark, vampiric stuff, but the idea of harvesting valuable substances in other humans has actually been around for a while so it might be true
 
@illegalsmile: the drug you mean is adrenochrome, which is an oxidized form of adrenaline. I have read a text somewhere (in dutch, so I won't post it) where someone say's adrenochrome is also the cause of mental illness. This isn't regularly accepted though. I have also read somewhere sometime that there were traces of bufotenine found in mentally ill patients. But this isn't the regular view as well... most "regular" psychiatrists think it is because of a dopamine inefficiency. A bit offtopic but it's what interests me lately since I had trouble with it myself.


@mescaline: Thanks for the articles, I'll look into it tomorrow when I am a little more clearheaded.
 
Illegalsmile a dit:
i think the dmt trips differ from ketamine because dmt, a psychedelic, is usually vivid and sometimes fast while ketamine, a tranquilizer, is normally hazy and slow.

You are right, but I think you are taking the ketamine model too far. It is not that the whole ketamine experience is similar to an OBE, rather only that part of the experience that is caused by the blockade of the NMDA receptors, which is suggested to mediate the feeling of leaving the body, i.e. an OBE.
I also realize now that I was wrong to say that this model is an alternative to the DMT explanation; it could actually go alongside it. The part of the experience involving leaving the body being caused by the blockade of the NMDA receptors, and all the mystical, visionary and other-worldy aspects of the OBE/NDE being caused by DMT secretion in the brain. Furthermore, it might not be so far off to think that all psychedelic substances, including DMT, might have properties in their mechanism of action that mediate (or even directly cause) the blockade of the NMDA receptors, as all psychedelic substances are known to be able to induce OBEs

gammagoblin a dit:
I have read a text somewhere (in dutch, so I won't post it) where someone say's adrenochrome is also the cause of mental illness. This isn't regularly accepted though. I have also read somewhere sometime that there were traces of bufotenine found in mentally ill patients. But this isn't the regular view as well... most "regular" psychiatrists think it is because of a dopamine inefficiency. A bit offtopic but it's what interests me lately since I had trouble with it myself.

I assume you mean (dysregulation of) those compounds are the cause of psychosis/schizophrenia, and not mental disorders in general? Because lots of different neurotransmitters are thought to be involved in different mental disorders, not solely either dopamine or adrenochrome or bufotenine.
(EDIT: I accidently found a scientific article about the involvement of adrenochrome in schizophrenia - it is mentioned, and downloadable, further on in this post)

Allusion a dit:
back with more info this time, looks like the cosmos answered my call. there's a lot more fruit to this thread now

http://www.youtopia.ws/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=807

That is a very interesting study you found. Here is the full article of what the post on youtopia is referring to, in case you or anybody else wants to read it:

Voir la pièce jointe 5168

I read about the involvement of the temporal lobe in causing mystical/psychedelic experiences in epilepsy patients before. I think I actually saw a documentary about it as well (can't remember its name now..). The person suffering from epilepsy in the documentary claimed the seizures (of the temporal lobe as I recall) giving him those experiences were amongst the most profound and important experiences in his life. He also stated that there would be no way that he would want to give up on them, as they gave him an extreme sense of peace and understanding of all that is afterwards, even though his family is very worried about his well-being due to the bizarre nature of the experiences and the dangers of sudden epileptic seizures. It seems there is definitely something to the temporal lobe in association with such psychedelic/mystical expriences.
Also in the text book I mentioned before (can't post the whole chapter as I only got a hardcopy..) there is mentioning of a case where an epileptic patient was electrically stimulated at the temporal lobe region, in response to which the patient exclaimed "Oh God! I am leaving my body!" (original reference: Penfield, W. (1955) The role of the temporal cortex in certain psychical phenomena. The Journal of Mental Science, 101, 451-465). Ah, I found the original article republished in The British Journal of Psychiatry (BJP) (and, on a side note, I actually found an article about the supposed involvement of adrenochrome in the cause of schizophrenia in the same volume of the BJP):

Voir la pièce jointe 5169
Voir la pièce jointe 5170

Lastly, yesterday I went to my barber (not your usual barber ;)), and she told me about an experience she had where she was in deep relaxation/meditation and was touched around the area of her temporal lobe by her "tutor", upon which she had a (very brief) mystical experience or vision, involving very bright light and overwhelming feelings. So that pretty much fits involvement of the temporal lobe as well. (NB: a bit off topic but somehow it happens to me quite regularly (enough that it becomes noticeable) that when I am thinking about a certain subject (just thinking not talking about it) that people around me start talking about that very thing, even if not 'directly' or consciously, like the barber, as I never told her anything about temporal lobes and such, and she didn't mention the temporal lobe, just referred to that part of the head.. Very strange, makes me think of things like a collective unconscious and (unconscious) telepathy and such.. Does anybody else experience this?).

I would be interested in how far psychedelic substances affect the temporal lobes. Maybe the temporal lobe explanation, DMT's role and the ketamine model can even be integrated into one general theory. Maybe abnormal temproal lobe function, somehow, as a by-product, affects glutamate secretion in a higher or lower degree depending on some other circumstances, thereby affecting the blockade/opening of NMDA receptors in a higher or lower degree, which might explain why one does not always have an OBE when having a mystical/psychedelic experience. Also, abnormal temporal lobe function might somehow mediate DMT secretion, explaining the mystical and psychedelic nature of these kind of experiences.

Ok,that's it for now. Sorry for the long post, again.. I seem to have a thing for long posts, haha, I probably even forgot to mention a thing or two I wanted to say. Hope you can appreciate it though. :)
 
@mescaline: You're right I was primarily referring to psychosis. Although I did read in the article of bufotenine that it could play a role in autistic people as well.

As for ketamine vs dmt, I haven't smoked DMT so I can't really compare the two but I have heard someone talking about these substances and he said they both bring you to the same plane but through different roads. ie ketamine shutting of the signals, and DMT amplifying them to extreme proportions.

Interesting that there could be a specific part of the brain responsible for these kinds of experiences. This poses the question to me, is that part of the brain designed to produce such experiences or would it be because of overload in that specific area for example?
 
gammagoblin a dit:
As for ketamine vs dmt, I haven't smoked DMT so I can't really compare the two but I have heard someone talking about these substances and he said they both bring you to the same plane but through different roads. ie ketamine shutting of the signals, and DMT amplifying them to extreme proportions.

Yes, I heard something along those lines as well, but the same goes for this as I told Illegalsmile: It is not about the ketamine experience as a whole. Just the fact that ketamine directly blocks NMDA receptors (it is a NDMA receptor antagonist), and the supposed observation that people under the influence of ketamine report OBEs quite frequently (more than compared to other psychedelic substances). This combined with the knowledge that many 'natural circumstances' (such as epileptic seizures for example) that cause OBEs cause a flooding of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain, which also causes the brain to block NDMA receptors.
After reading the article by Braithwaite et al. (2011) I have to say though, that this theory is probably wrong. As is stated in the article OBEs are also experienced quite regularly (relatively speaking of course) by 'normal', healthy people. Those people then would not experience such 'natural circumstances' and consequently would not have their brains flooded with glutamate, in turn causing no blockade of the NMDA receptors, unless there is some unkown factor which causes this blockade in those people. Maybe these people are predisposed to having low amounts of NMDA receptors, or have naturally occuring high levels of glutamate going around in their brains, or something else along those lines, thus making them more prone to OBEs.

gammagoblin a dit:
Interesting that there could be a specific part of the brain responsible for these kinds of experiences. This poses the question to me, is that part of the brain designed to produce such experiences or would it be because of overload in that specific area for example?

I do not think there is a specific brain region that is responsible for mystical experiences or alike. These experiences can take on various forms with differing emotional aspects, absence or presence of either auditory or visual hallucinations, can involve the future, the past or neither, involving only the here and now. I'd say any single combination of these, and any other features I didn't mention, would involve (at least in part) different regions of the brain in comparison to any other combination of features of the experience.
What probably is the case is that any specific feature of the experience, as opposed to the experience as a whole, is produced by a certain region of the brain. In the introductory section of the article by Braithwaite et al. (2011) there is a short mentioning of the 'emerging view' in regard to how the "exocentral" perspective during an OBE is induced (i.e. how one can perceive one's surrounding from a different point of view than that of your own body/your eyes). It states that it is due to "simultaneous breakdown in parietal networks sub-serving multi-sensory egocentric processing and medial temporal-lobe structures involved in exocentric perspective-taking".
To understand this you have to know that the parietal lobe is involved in integrating information from different sensorial modalities (touch, sound, vision etc.) to create a picture of the 'whole' experience. This whole experience is what you normally experience in everyday life. You rarely experience the world solely in terms of touch, or sound (etc.), unless of course you are tripping very hard or have some other experience like this. Actually I have read or heard somewhere that fMRI scans showed less communication between different parts of the brain in people under the influence of some psychedelic substance (don't remember which; probably LSD or psilocybine/psilocyne). This could pretty much be boiled down to the same argument made in the first part of the quote about the breakdown in parietal networks. Anyway, back to the OBE: Due to the breakdown in the parietal networks in question, visual information and sensory feedback information from the body itself, such as the unconscious awareness of the location and positioning of the different parts or limbs of your body and how much effort is being used in moving these body parts (proprioceptive feedback) and the feeling of balance (vestibular feedback), is not integrated into a 'whole' picture. Still the brain has to give you some kind of experience (it doesn't just "crash" like a computer would, giving you the blue screen of death or something :P (unless you consider this to be the "crash")). So it does the best it can with the information it has received and integrated to create a 'complete' experience. So the proprioceptive and vestibular feedback are not combined with the visual information coming in, resulting in a visual experience where you are not in your body. It doesn't really matter where you are looking from, as long as it is not your body. From there on all kind of strange experiences can arise as your brain is trying really hard to make sense of things, keeping it as sensical as it possibly can with such strange incoherent sensorial information coming in.

Now, this theory, as far as I can tell, doesn't really combine well with the ketamine model of OBEs. Unless an NMDA receptor blockade might cause a breakdown of the parts of the parietal and temporal lobe mentioned before, but this doesn't fit very well with case reports of temporal lobe stimulation causing this kind of experiences. My guess is one of them is wrong, probably the ketamine model because of the reason mentioned at the start of this post.

EDIT: I wanted to say one more thing, as I can very well understand that all of this might look as if I am saying that these kind of experiences are nothing more than a 'damaged' or dyregulated brain trying to make sense of the world. I do not believe this is entirely the case. I believe there is quite some more value to these kind of experiences. They show us what the world is like outside of ordinary everyday life. I do not think that just because the brain works differently that all of a sudden it is any less real. I mean, what makes this specific configuration of our brains any more real than any of the (many) 'psychedelic' configurations? I believe a lot can be learnt from those experiences about the world. There is, in my opinion, a lot more to life than the undrugged and unaltered state of consciousness, which is just one aspect of reality, one way of experiencing reality, one "codec" if you like. But there are many more "codecs" which are just as real and meaningful, from which just as much if not more can be learnt. I even think it is very important to make these other states of consciousness part of humanities 'reality-perspective' as it is pretty much impossible to really understand ordinary reality without having something else to compare it to.
Ok, just had to mention that. While re-reading my post it came across kind of 'empty' and mechanical, but that's just the scientist in me talking. :P
 
i think you're right mescaline, in that there is much to explore in using psycho actives.

I actually think altered states and near death experiences are closely related. im even going to sound crazy, but i think descriptions of alien abductions or encounters sound very similar to psycho actives but these happen to normal people who dont use them. even encounters with the divine like angels or god seem connected to altered states like ayahuasca when looked at in comparison. im not sure what that would mean if these all connected but i think they are.
 
Yea, we have much to learn from these kind of experiences. Actually today at a lecture at uni it was mentioned (a bit of Kantian philosophy) that the success of the "sciences" is at least partly attributable to the fact that they only concern themselves with the reality that we can observe around us and can interact with, without the need to go beyond the "properties" of our ordinary reality experience, such as Time and Space. On the other hand philosophy is said to not be so successful because it does concern itself with aspects of reality that go beyond Time and Space, and beyond the "experiential world", namely the "real world" (in german also referred to as "das Ding an sich"; the thing on itself (best I can do in translating it :P). This "real world" cannot in any way be experienced or known as everything we know or can experience is subject to be altered to "our way of seeing the world" in terms of Time, Space and also our "Reason(ing)". The real world doesn't have these properties, or at least we do not know for sure it does.
I was thinking that actually by ingesting psychedelics, or by some other way experiencing those altered states of consciousness, you could investigate reality going beyond at least Time and Space, to at least some extent. As in those altered states of consciousness Time and Space are experienced extremely different, sometimes being experienced as being completely absent or nonexistent. So, as far as I can tell, by experiencing, investigating and comparing those altered states to the ordinary state of consciousness, one actually could do some valuable research with gaining some real knowledge about reality beyond Time and Space, at the very least more than we currently know about it. This knowledge being a lot more concrete than the current theories, which are not really based on anything but introspection and crazy ideas ("crazy" in a good way :P) from (well-known) philosophers. Of course the reason this is not being done allready is because those altered states are still not really considered to be real, or not as real as the experience of ordinary reality. Although, as I see it, more credit is given to those altered states as time goes by. It probably is only a matter of time untill this great paradigm shift will happen. I hope I will be able to see that day, hehe.

Regarding aliens, I read about the alien abductions as well, and I think you are right. It doesn't sound crazy to me at all. :P I think Rick Strassman hypothesized that they were caused by DMT secretion in the brain as well, due to extreme stress or something, as I recall, explaining why they are so similar to psychedelic experiences. He also described the experiences of subjects in his experiments with DMT injection where they encountered "aliens" or other entities which could be interpreted in that way. You probably read the book yourself, am I right?
I also met someone at university who smoked DMT a lot for a while and encountered an entity. Everytime he smoked the DMT he would be transported back into what he called a "room" where the entity would be to communicate with him, and even to continue "conversations" he had last he smoked it. He said the entity wanted him to "upload" or transfer his knowledge about humanity to the entity so that "they" could learn about us. He has also posted his experiences (or at least some of them) on this subject in a thread on the bluelight forums (I think).
I don't really have a definite opinion about the existence of alien entities in different dimensions or anything, though it surely seems plausible. But on the other hand it could just as well be some grand illusion/hallucination, wherein the entities are just aspects of the Self, or something similar.
Another thing about those experiences seeming similar. Maybe they do seem similar at first, but really, I do not have spent enough time in all those different kinds of altered states to say they really are that similar. Psychedelic experiences (being slightly different for different substances), Near-Deathy experiences, out-of-body experiences, experiences induced by episodes of temporal lobe epilepsy, of migraine episodes, experiences of alien abduction, experiences induced by holotropic breathing, by deep meditation, psychotic episodes, and many more experiences of this kind... They might all be very different, as the only reason they all seem so similar may be because they are very different to ordinary reality. Spending a whole lifetime in one of those other states of consciousness, say the psychedelic state, might make all of the other states (including our ordinary state) seem as similar to eachother and as different from that psychedelic state of consciousness as that all the altered states mentioned before seem similar to eachother and different from our ordinary state of consciousness.
 
interesting ideas floating around here. it's got my mind to thinking.. thanks for the wealth of information you guys, especially from mescaline. you've really taken the topic to the next level. im not sure i have an opinion formulated yet. looks like i have some reading to do as well



(NB: a bit off topic but somehow it happens to me quite regularly (enough that it becomes noticeable) that when I am thinking about a certain subject (just thinking not talking about it) that people around me start talking about that very thing, even if not 'directly' or consciously, like the barber, as I never told her anything about temporal lobes and such, and she didn't mention the temporal lobe, just referred to that part of the head.. Very strange, makes me think of things like a collective unconscious and (unconscious) telepathy and such.. Does anybody else experience this?)

that's getting into astrology and sacred geometry my friend. tread lightly with those words, some people get all hot and bothered once the idea of coincidence is thrown out the window. personally, i believe there is no such thing as coincidence...
 
You're welcome. :lol:

Allusion a dit:
that's getting into astrology and sacred geometry my friend. tread lightly with those words, some people get all hot and bothered once the idea of coincidence is thrown out the window. personally, i believe there is no such thing as coincidence...

Well, let them become hot and bothered. If they want to feel that way, putting themselves in a not so pleasant mental state, they can go ahead. That doesn't bother me, it would be quite amusing to see that actually; grown ups acting like little children. ;)
I'll just say, everyone should make up their own mind, and not be bothered if there are other people that don't agree. There will always be people that don't agree.
However, this does not mean one should not consider what they are saying :!:

Me, personally, I haven't made up my mind about there being or not being coincidence, but these kind of experiences do make me seriously doubt it. My intuition tells me there is no coincidence. Although, haha, if taking the word co-incidence literally, all of these experiences are of course, by definition, coincidences, as they "co-incided" :lol: .
Anyway, in the common sense of the word, my feeling tells me there is none.

EDIT:
Also, in my experience these "coincidences" occur more regularly when I am regularly sober (here meaning not smoking cannabis every day). When you have taken "real" psychedelic substances they occur even more though. I get the impression that smoking cannabis every day, at least for some people, might actually put you in a state farther away from the "psychedelic state" than compared to not smoking or smoking cannabis only on occasion.
 
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